Las Vegas Hires General Fanager Creator Tom Poraszka

The Las Vegas NHL Expansion Team has hired General Fanager creator Tom Poraszka as a Hockey Operations Analyst. Poraszka created General Fanager, a popular salary cap tracking application.

General Fanager—created in 2015—was a website that tracked NHL teams’ salary cap, player contracts, and player movement. It also allowed visitors to customize teams with trades and transactions while staying cap compliant. The website filled a gap left by the wildly popular CapGeek, which shuttered operations after its founder Matthew West battled cancer. General Fanager becomes the latest NHL analytic website shut down after its creator joins an NHL organization. Current alternatives include CapFriendly—a PHR favorite—and NHLNumbers.

Hiring amateur hockey analysts based on their web applications is a recent NHL trend. More and more teams are hiring these creators in an effort to boost their salary cap understanding and their advanced statistics department. Whether or not this trend continues, however, remains to be seen. Both the Montreal Canadiens and the Edmonton Oilers decided not to renew the contracts of their analytic hires.